Mina's house was a different world—laughter spilling from the pool, music drifting through the open air, everything warm, chaotic, alive.
"Amara!" Mina beamed as she swung open the gate. "As beautiful as ever."
Inside, cousins splashed water, food crowded the tables, and the air was thick with perfume and chlorine. Mina dragged me upstairs, shoving swimsuits into my hands.
"You're impossible," she sighed when I picked a plain white shirt and dolphin shorts. "With a body like yours, why hide it?"
"I'm not comfortable," I said simply.
She rolled her eyes. "Unbelievable."
By the pool, her cousins greeted me like family. Even Sofia, once distant, hugged me with surprising sweetness. Too much sweetness. I laughed awkwardly, unused to affection that clung so tightly.
While we filled our plates with food, Mina leaned close.
"Two more cousins are coming," she whispered. "You haven't met them—they've been in Canada. Boys." She smirked. "Dangerous boys. Don't fall for them."
I raised a brow. "Dangerous?"
"Heartbreakers," she said. "Girls fall, they walk away. Handsome enough to get away with it. You know the type." She chuckled, but her eyes glinted as if she half-meant it. Her words lingered like smoke before a fire.
Mina rushed off to greet them, leaving me by the pool. The laughter continued, but something in the air had shifted—the echoes dimmer, the shadows longer, as if the house itself had paused. My skin prickled. I felt eyes on me—someone unseen, waiting.
A few minutes later, footsteps echoed inside. Excited voices rose, then Mina's shout rang through the air, bright and electric.
"Ethan and Eros are here!"
The name stopped me cold.
Eros.
It pressed against my chest like something I should remember, something I should fear. The syllables lingered in the air, heavy and sharp, slicing through the laughter and music around me.
My throat tightened, and I swallowed hard, suddenly aware of every inch of my skin, every pulse in my veins.
Then the noise swelled—the shuffle of shoes on tile, cousins rushing forward, laughter spilling over itself. A burst of chatter, an out-of-sync cheer—but it all became background static the moment he stepped into view.
Tall. Poised. A presence that didn't ask for attention but demanded it anyway.
His confidence clung to him like a second skin, shoulders broad, movements slow and deliberate, as though the world itself would pause to make space for him.
Every step had weight; every turn of his head was measured. Nothing about him was casual, nothing accidental.
The light caught him cruelly—sharp cheekbones, the cut of his jaw, the faint curl of dark hair brushing his forehead.
Handsome wasn't the word. Beautiful wasn't either. He was something else entirely. Something sculpted to tempt, dangerous, magnetic.
His shadow stretched before him, dark and imposing, almost separate from his body, as if it had its own intent. Even before his gaze found mine, I felt it—the pressure, the pull, like invisible fingers tracing the curve of my throat, electric and consuming.
My pulse betrayed me, quickening, each beat loud in my ears, hammering against ribs that suddenly felt too tight. My hands, tucked nervously at my sides, tingled with a phantom awareness of him, as if he had already breached the space around me without touching it.
Then his eyes lifted.
The world shrank. The noise, the laughter, the sun glinting off the pool—all of it vanished. The space between us collapsed, replaced by an invisible gravity only he seemed to command.
Dark. Unreadable. Piercing. His gaze caught me and held me as though he'd been searching for me all along, and found me at last.
My lips parted, a quiet gasp trapped behind them. My stomach twisted into a coil, and my body remembered—the shadow at the alley, the hand on my wrist, the suffocating nearness of danger I had barely escaped. And yet, here he was, a dangerous certainty made flesh, and part of me leaned forward despite every instinct screaming to recoil.
Something in him felt alive, predatory, like a force that had been waiting for this exact moment.
I was aware of everything—the scrape of my sandals against the tile, the brush of fabric against my skin, the faint scent of his cologne that seemed to curl into the air before it reached me. It was smoke and metal, warmth and threat, familiar and utterly foreign at the same time.
My chest tightened. My pulse thundered in my ears. I wanted to speak, to run, to disappear—anything but remain in this unbearable magnetism. But my body betrayed me. I couldn't step back, couldn't look away. His presence had claimed the space around me, and I was trapped, willingly or not, in the pull of it.
Then he shifted ever so slightly, the faintest movement, and the entire world seemed to bend toward him. I knew, in that breathless instant, that nothing about this encounter would be ordinary.
Suddenly, the laughter, the chatter, the sunlight glinting off the pool—everything fell away. There was only him.
The one I wasn't supposed to see again.
My body knew before my mind admitted it: I was already ensnared. Familiarity like this was never an accident.
He moved closer, unhurried, his footsteps almost swallowed by the chatter around us. Almost. I heard them anyway—measured, deliberate, like a countdown I couldn't escape.
Before I could retreat, he was there. Close. Too close. The faintest trace of his scent slipped through my guard—smoke, and something sharper, like metal warmed by skin.
"Amara." My name left his lips low, rich, as though he'd been keeping it there for years.
A chill rippled down my arms. He knows me?
No—impossible. The only times I'd seen him were fleeting: that night at the bar, a shadow at the edge of laughter and neon. Then again on the street, a figure too still, too watchful to be ordinary. Nothing more. Nothing that should have given him the right to speak my name like this.
I forced my voice steady. "Do I... know you?"
His mouth curved—not quite a smile, not quite a threat. "Not yet." His gaze held mine, unrelenting, as if binding me in place. "But you will."
My throat tightened, my breath catching for a beat too long. The noise of my cousins blurred into nothing; all I could hear was the dangerous certainty in his voice.
Then, as if the moment had never belonged to me at all, Mina slipped in—her hand on his arm, pulling him easily into the fold of family greetings. The spell shattered, air flooding back into my lungs.
But the weight of his stare lingered. It clung to me, heavy and unshakable, like a mark I hadn't chosen yet somehow carried.